Hello everyone! I am learning mapmaking as I go and have decided to start a map that is based on a drive I made once to the Red Mountains in southwestern Utah. Here is the map of the area to be covered. In total a 12km x 12km area to be completed. I do plan on making the map as close to 1:1 scale as I can without spending too much time on it . My main focus on this map is currently the road that comes off of the interstate on the bottom right and goes through the desert a bit then heads northwest to the foot of the Red Mountain. Altogether a roughly 8 mile strip. I originally started this map based on a heightmap I got from terrain.party. It worked in the X and Y axes, but the Z axis was considerably inaccurate. The terrain had so little detail, that I used a picture of a map from Google Earth as the terrain paint to lay out the roads. After spending two weeks fine tuning the scale of the map, learning how to properly make roads, and making buildings in blender, I learned how to make the terrain from LiDAR data, which is so much more accurate. Here is a comparison of the default spawn before and after using the LiDAR data. Now for the bad news, Lidar data does not exist for the full 12km by 12km area I want to do, about 52 square km is not mapped. Thankfully, the area of focus is completely covered, save for the top left section. The map below shows the planned area in light blue and the available data in dark blue squares. The areas I have the terrain completed for are in black. Luckily, the right hand area is fairly flat, so I should be able to get away with using the heightmap there, the top left is going to take some work though.
Yeah, I could have definitely added more images of what I had done at the time. If you would like, I could upload those images and the map in its current state. I've had to redo the roads and am in the process of doing so, but there is plenty of off road driving from earlier attempts I made before finding higher quality terrain scans.
Hey all. I have made a bit of progress in the past little bit. For instance, Here is the old default spawn area as it is now. This will be the new default spawn. It is at the edge of the map, but It is the starting point for the main road. The biggest success was getting sidewalks that don't eat tires! I made them out of mesh roads that I set the depth to .25, got all of the nodes at the perfect height, then imported them all as one object to Blender, then added the bevel and increased the depth to a meter so I could adjust the height of the sidewalks in either direction and to prevent tire eating. This Interchange is a bit strange. The traffic switches sides of the road and back on either side of the overpass here. Finally, I have all of the roads painted out (in the current 12km^2 area) and am working on finishing the decal roads now that I have a system down for putting them in. I've had to redo the terrain already due to getting the scale slightly wrong on the map. I set the square size to 1.5, but needed 1.46. I also made the mistake of scaling the terrain models instead of leaving them alone, which made for some impressive hills, but they were completely unrealistic. I do plan on uploading what I have soon, if anybody wants it as it is right now. I will need to trim the file size by quite a bit first before I can as it currently has the terrain meshes which are close to 100MB a piece and there are currently 12 of them. Couple that with a ton of textures I'm not going to use and you got a file that's 4 GB.
